In today's technology for fabricating automotive glass parts such as side lites and back lites, the glass brackets to be used in the fabrication of such parts are received in large wooden crates or metal containers in which individual glass brackets are stood on edge laying one against the other with as many as one hundred or more brackets in a single crate. These brackets are not located relative to one another except along their bottom edge. In other words, there is no common XY locating position for the plurality of brackets packed in a single crate.
Because of the failure to have the individual brackets in a crate located relative to one another in both the X and the Y dimensions, it is necessary to manually unpack these brackets and have the unpacker carefully place each bracket in a fixture upon which proper XY location of the individual glass bracket may be achieved. Use of an operator for accomplishing this manual transfer and locating of the glass bracket is, of course, an expensive operation. The operation is also a tedious one because of its repetitive nature and thus tends to be boring to the operator.
I have attempted over the years to design automated equipment for unpacking and accurately loading glass brackets which have been packed on edge in wooden crates. I have not been very successful in my endeavors because of the fact that the brackets boxed in such a manner are not aligned in both the X and the Y directions. In order to adjust for this mis-alignment, the handling equipment is unnecessarily complex and, therefore, costly to build. Also, because of the complexity of the equipment, the service time required for unit of serviceable life is also quite high.
I have now decided that the best approach is to break the uncrating and the locating of the glass bracket into two separate but simple operations. I can design quite simply an unloader device which is necessary to remove glass brackets from a crate, which device needs locate only off of the one edge engaging the bottom of the crate. This application is not directed to such a simple machine because such is well within the skill of those knowledgeable in the glass handling arts.
The device and method of this invention is a method which takes the uncrated glass bracket and moves it to a precise position in which X and Y coordinates are accurately located for the glass bracket. Thereafter, another glass handling apparatus may pick the located bracket up and move it into engagement with further glass processing equipment.
It is a principal object of my invention to provide a method for moving objects floatable on a gas stream from one of a plurality of first stations to a second station. The second station is a station which gives an accurate location of at least two dimensions on the object moved thereto.
It is another object of my invention to provide a method for moving glass brackets from one of a plurality of first work stations to a second work station at which at least two edges of the bracket are accurately located.
It is still another object of my invention to provide a method such as described above which is simple and easy to operate and which may be used to convey objects of various sizes, shapes and configurations.